The nation entered into a brief discussion about race as a by-product of the not guilty verdict the jury rendered in the George Zimmerman murder trial.

I believe that race is ubiquitously woven into American society; a thorough discussion about race is needed. I contend that any discussion about race in the immediate aftermath of an emotionally charged trial is the wrong time to explore the topic. A more productive way would be to build up to specifics after engaging in a broad based dialogue.

That said, the above link accesses a video in which a social experiment takes place. Please ignore the headline which slants perception.

Question:

How does one account of the disparity in treatment received by the various individuals attempting to compromise the bike lock and thus take possession of the bike?

If we are to consider it an experiment, isn't there more we should know? For example, how many hours of footage were taken? What ended up on the cutting room floor ? Why was this location chosen? What are the demographics of this area? What are the crime rates in this geographical area?

I'm familiar with this show, whose values are definitely progressive. I would not rule out the possibility of selective editing to serve the progressive agenda (see e.g. http://nationalreview.com/article/354794/bending-trayvon-martin-tragedy-fit-jonah-goldberg ) , but if I read between the lines correctly the last three of your questions imply the validity of racial profiling. In that the segment purports to establish the existence of racial profiling, in a sense can we say that you and Walter are in agreement?

Even allowing for the possibility of selective editing, the existence of ANY footage wherein various people flagrantly let the white guy slide in his open declarations of thievery is pretty fg remarkable.

Validity of racial profiling? A friend once worked for the NYPD in a very high crime pct. in N. Brooklyn. The area was demographically black/hispanic. As the area was a center of large scale drug trafficing, white guys were noted and contacted quite aggressively as small time dealers from LI or Jersey could buy at a price that would be very profitable.

Walter, Welcome! Very interesting video. Even though it is a dramatization on the part of the 3 actors, it is quite remarkable. It raises a number of different questions. GM hit one; how many takes or different looks did it take to get that footage. I assume there is truth potrayed here even though the show was very possibly fishing for this result. It is interesting that the black woman makes the most race pre-judging comment, saying it isn't common that a white guy would be carrying burglary tools.

To me, the woman stealing and the white guy looked like actors in a joke or stunt. None of it looked much like a real crime in process although the black actor seemed to be the most convincing. Was that because of race only? I don't know. What is strange is not people discovering and confronting him for stealing in broad daylight; everything he says and does indicates he is stealing the bike. The strange part is the disbelief that the other actors could be stealing.

Of course there is a race perception element in this, and people pre-judge based on how each looks. From there, then what? Does that stereotype fit real data, is it imagined or is it both? Is it fair? My guess is that most bike thieves are white, that most black guys are not thieves of any kind and judging them on looks is totally unfair, but the likelihood of a young black man going into crime in America I would guess is higher than for other races, based on circumstances in my opinion, not based on race.

I would like to know what part of this is because of our bad economic policies and what part of this is from perceptions portrayed in the video.

My only data point is the teenager in this family who is making more than twice the minimum wage at her day job, added an evening job, has all the hours she can handle and turned down other job offers this summer.

I believe that would fit in the racial profiling arena. Here, race is the secondary issue. The illegal activity is the primary issue. One would argue that a white person would not be in the area unless he/she is purchasing drugs. It is sort of a scenic route approach to the issue but it still fits.

I think a more comparable example of racial profiling would be if a white male wlaking down a street in a black neighborhood would be assumed to be doing something illegal just because he is alone

I must clearly be having issues as I keep losing the post and now my reply to your response. Even though I am having difficulties, I wanted to express this now.

Upon further cogitating, I believe that your analogous is an example of discrimination, not profiling. Profiling is using race as a vehicle to determine likelihood of one committing a crime, a certain act or behavior-stereotyping.

In your example, the crime, as I understood it, was purchasing drugs. the racial makeup of the people was the criteria used to arrest-discriminatory in nature.

Funny video, there are obvious profound differences. No "white leader" will step forward to explain how social inequalities and oppression are responsible for the thuggish behavior of SoCal surfers, or demand million of dollars for outreach programs to work with the surfer community. I also don't see masses of white people marching, blaming the decades of police abuse for the surfer riot or demanding the officers that arrested the surfers and the HB chief of police be fired.

Of course, bright fellow that you are, you also know the differences the the respective histories of the two groups , , ,

How is that relevant in 2013? We have a black president, black attorney general, both of whom love to play the race card. MLK didn't dream of black race baiters rising to power. When I worked with juvenile offenders, who were of all ethnicities and socioeconomic backgrounds, I told them "A traumatic childhood isn't a hunting license for the rest of humanity".

The point being that "We are depraved because we are deprived" is garbage. When the racial industrial complex tries to turn a thug rightfully getting shot into a victim and tries to pretend that America in 2013 is Mississippi in 1953, they cheapen the real victims and the real injustices from that time.

Someone sent me the link to this article, and I could hardly believe what I read. Folks, this is just too crazy for words. Forty-year-old Tawana Brawley was recently celebrated, treated as a rock star at a New Jersey fundraiser.

This article about people awarding Brawley sainthood is a hoax, right? C'mon, am I on Candid Camera or being "punked," as they say today?

Have the event organizers completely lost their minds? Are their brains so infected with the putrid pus of racial hatred that they have lost all sense of a moral compass?

For those of you unaware, Tawana Brawley committed an evil hoax which sparked a national racial firestorm in 1987.

Fearful of being punished for staying out overnight, Brawley, then 15, lied, saying 6 white men, including state officials, kidnapped her, raped her, used charcoal to cover her body with racial epithets, and smeared her with feces.

Al Sharpton was the spokesperson for Brawley's family. Sharpton ran to microphones and blasted white America with both barrels.

Even when the truth was revealed and defendants sued and won, Sharpton never backed down from Brawley's lie, nor has he apologized to this day. Sharpton and Brawley's two attorneys were ordered to pay $345,000 in damages.

So why after 25 years would the event organizers rewrite history, turning this sinner into a saint, praising her for surviving society's "lies since 1987"? What on earth were they thinking? Brawley lied! The white guys she lied on got paid. Are these people living in a parallel universe or what?

The emcee for the Bizarro-World love-fest event for Brawley was former City College professor Leonard Jeffries. He has said "rich Jews" financed the slave trade and that whites are violent, cruel "ice people." Folks, the fact that this racist nutty professor has had access to the impressionable minds of our youths terrifies and angers me.

And yet, Jeffries's ilk dominate campuses across America.

Now get this, folks: proceeds from the $50-a-person fundraiser went to a kid's camp. What the heck did the organizers tell the kids about their keynote?

See, kids, you too can concoct a vile lie smearing innocent people and then grow up and be treated like royalty.

With all the brilliant, honorable blacks out there who should be held high as inspirational role models, why in heaven's name would the event organizers select Tawana "Lying Hoaxter" Brawley? Lord help us.

Since the election of Obama, millions of blacks have embraced a brain-dead mindset fueled by racism -- by loyalty to skin-color. If Obama announced that he is the spawn of Satan, blacks would still call all who oppose his agenda racist. And no, I am not saying Obama is a devil.

Folks, as a proud American who happens to be black, the insane "race trumps everything" thinking prevalent in the black community continues to amaze, sadden, and frustrate me. You are probably as sick of reading my articles about this topic as I am of writing them. Still, I feel compelled to shine the light of truth -- a voice crying in the wilderness.

And whom has the Race Exploitation Industry and mainstream media chosen to elevate to black icon status? Tawana Brawley, Rachel Jeantel (19 years old and still in high school) and thug Trayvon Martin. Though his death was extremely tragic, unarguably Martin was a thug.

Speaking of the having the putrid pus of racial hatred on the brain, black Chicago Rep. Monique Davis suggested that the reports of epidemic black on black murders in Chicago are really a cover-up for white cops killing young black men. Good grief!

Black America, why are you allowing such insanely hateful racist people to speak for you? Rep. Davis's thinking is typical of the CBC and NAACP. Thus, I would never give a dime of financial support to either race exploitation group. While Davis and her ilk continue to blame whites and make excuses, black America is swiftly going down the toilet.

Equally frustrating is black America's willingness to lay down their morals, values, and ability to reason at the feet of Obama in worship simply because he is black.

Thanks for the refresher on that GM. Would you be so kind as to bring your google fu to bear on Sharpton's demagoguery in , , , I want to say "Crown Heights" or something like that-- there was a car-pedestrian accident where the driver was Jewish and the pedestrian was black and the way I remember it Sharpton said some pogrom provoking things that were part of setting off some nasty anti-semitic rioting , , ,

An author Walter pointed us to made a point that there is no such thing as black on black crime. Though the numbers seem to prove him wrong, I believe he is right. Those crimes were about crime, not about race. It is analysts and people with an agenda who inject race into that crime statistic, not the criminal or the victim. Race may correlate but race is not the cause or any part of those crimes in my view.

Within America there is an underclass that feels a sense of worthlessness. My grandfather used to say that poor people have poor ways. The converse is that to succeed one should emulate the good and productive qualities of successful people. For example, go as far as you can with your education, work hard, work smart, marry for life, marry before you start a family, save, invest, pay your bills, keep your promises, take pride in your home and your neighborhood, take responsibility for yourself and your family, etc. There is a culture in the underclass of America that is doing exactly the opposite. My view is this is perpetuated and exacerbated by the enormity of the welfare state.

Within America's inner city and in plenty of other locations this underclass lives outside of our productive economy. When responsibility and self-worth are absent, idle time and a propensity to be broke, commit crimes, be evicted etc take the place of productive and healthy activities.

The problems in 'black America' are not racial. Too many people happen to be black within the underclass, but it is quite easy to show that these problems are cultural, not racial. Just look at the exceptions. Any black who follows the path of success is successful, while any person of any race who follows the path of failure, realizes failure.

We need to tell people at every step along the way that they have choices. These so-called black leaders are doing exactly the opposite in my view.

The United House of Prayer, a large African-American church was also a major landlord in Harlem. They raised the rent Freddy's Fashion Mart, a Jewish-owned clothing store which had operated from the same Harlem location for over 40 years. In turn Freddy's had to raise the rent on its sub-tenant, a black-owned record store. A landlord-tenant dispute ensued. As he has done so often in his life, Al Sharpton turned this non-racial economic dispute into a racial conflict.

The Sharpton-led protests began in August and came to a head on the morning of Friday, December 8th when Roland James Smith, Jr., who had been part of the Sharpton's protests, walked into Freddy's Fashion Mart, pulled out a gun, ordered all the black customers to leave, spilled paint thinner on several bins of clothing and set them on fire -- a fire that resulted in killing 7 people plus Smith. The only African American left in the story was Freddy's security guard Kareem Brunner, 22-years-old, who was ordered to stay by the mass murderer Smith.

At the time the faux-preacher claimed he wasn't involved in the protests, he was only there to mediate. He also claimed there was no Antisemitism involved in the protests, but he has been proven to be a liar.

Soon after the massacre, the Jewish Action Alliance, a New York-based civil-rights group, released audiotapes of several of Sharpton's weekly radio show in which Morris Powell, leader of the 125th Street Vendor's Association, can be heard using racial and anti-Semitic language to encourage Harlem residents to boycott Freddy's. Learning from his Crown Heights experience Sharpton let others push the anti-Semitic hatred but it was all done on his show.

"We are going to see that this cracker suffers," Powell is heard telling a crowd in one broadcast on Aug. 19.

"Reverend Sharpton is on it. We have made contact with these crackers. We don't expect a lot out of them. They haven't seen how we feel about anything yet. We are going to show them." He also said

They think they gonna drive this man out of business, they gotta be out of their minds. We are not gonna stand idly by and let a Jewish person come in Black Harlem and methodically drive black people out of business up and down 125th Street. If we stand for that, we'll stand for anything. Which we've been doing. At a rally was recorded on Sept. 9, Mr. Sharpton is heard telling a crowd:

"I want to make it clear to the radio audience and to you here that we will not stand by and allow them to move this brother so that some white interloper can expand his business on 125th Street.

Ironically Sharpton was the interloper, he was living in Hollis Queens at around the time Freddy's opened in Harlem and living in New Jersey when Freddy's was burned down. When other white-owned businesses fled the neighborhood as the population became more African-American, Fred Harari the owner of Freddy's continued to serve the neighborhood.

On an October 21st broadcast Norman "Granddad" Reide said:

I am saying to the Jewish community and specifically to Abraham Foxman, that you come out and utter a word, accusatory remark against Reverend Sharpton, Jesse Jackson, Donna Wilson, Reverend Shields, or Gary Byrd, we will boycott you and nobody loves money any more than the Jewish people. Thank you.

In court papers filed the day before the fire, Harari and two employees described weeks of protests outside the clothing store in which demonstrators threatened employees, hurled obscenities at "bloodsucking Jews" and talked of burning down the store.

Aftermath Sharpton, the professional bigot criticized NYPD investigators for quickly linking the fire to the protesters. But the police evidence and the tapes from the Jewish Alliance proved him to be a liar. After first telling the press "What's wrong with calling someone a white interloper?" he apologized for using that term. He never apologized for the Jew-hatred broadcast on his radio shows and spoken at the rallies he helped to organize. He continues to deny that the rallies had anything to do with the firebombing

Of course Sharpton never apologized for Tawana Brawley or slandering DA Pagones by with the unfounded charge that Pagones was the rapist,

“I did what I believed….They are asking me to grovel. They want black children to say they forced a black man coming out of the hard-core ghetto to his knees….Once you begin bending, it’s ‘did you bend today?’ or ‘I missed the apology, say it again.’ Once you start compromising, you lose respect for yourself.”

..nor did he apologize for saying the "Central Park Jogger" was raped by her boyfriend and leading demonstrations calling the woman who was raped and beaten to within a hair of death a whore...

...and he certainly never apologized for the anti-Semitic Pogrom he led at Crown Heights.

Al Sharpton is a Baptist Minister who regularly breaks the ninth commandment, Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbor, he has incited riots which have lead to the deaths of innocents. A real preacher would not have incited violence but called for peace. A real preacher would have waited for the truth before he incited and a real preacher would have apologized when he wrongly accused people...none of which Al Sharpton has done.

Sharpton's real business isn't preaching, his real business is being a professional agitator. In the end just like a TV detergent, Al Sharpton is selling a product...Al Sharpton. And he has been rewarded for his efforts with an undeserved halo of respectability by the press, by MSNBC, and by the President of the United States.

As you read, watch or hear the news reports about Sharpton's protests with the Trayvon Martin family, understand this context. Sharpton couldn't give a rat's ass about Travyon, his grieving family or improving the lives of African Americans in this country. He is only concerned with selling his product.

Al Sharpton led marches through Brooklyn’s Bensonhurst neighborhood after the 1989 stabbing death of Yusuf Hawkins, a 16-year-old black youth. Sharpton himself survived being stabbed in Bensonhurst in 1991.

Commentary by Jeff Dunetz

Al Sharpton’s incitement of anger and violence in the Trayvon Martin / George Zimmerman case recalls what he did in Crown Heights.

Twenty-two years ago, a tragic car accident in that Brooklyn neighborhood escalated into a pogrom against the Jewish people. The media gives it a politically correct description — violence between the area’s blacks and Jews. But the violence was not two-sided, it was an attack on the Jews by the neighborhood’s Caribbean community, fueled in part by Al Sharpton, now an MSNBC host and adviser to President Obama.

Black anti-Semitism in 1991

Jews were a key part of the civil rights movement in the 1960s. When the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. made his famous march to Selma, Alabama, he walked hand in hand with many Jews including Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel. Along with the Jews was a contingent of Torahs to emphasize that the quest for Civil Rights was a holy mission for the Jewish people.

In spite of the strong Jewish participation in the civil rights movement, the transformation from the peaceful marches to black power movement introduced considerable friction into African American-Jewish relations, especially within the “Black Muslim” movement.

During the 1970s and 1980s, African-Americans stopped looking at Jews as their allies but rather as their oppressors. Jews were seen as having the political power that African-Americans desired; such black leaders as Louis Farrakhan and Jesse Jackson went public with anti-Semitic comments.

Adding to the hatred were leaders of the South African anti-Apartheid movement who toured the United States as conquering heroes, spreading Jew-hatred. In 1984, Desmond Tutu publicly complained about American Jews having “an arrogance — the arrogance of power because Jews are a powerful lobby in this land and all kinds of people woo their support.

Understandably, Jewish-Black relations were already rocky as New York entered the summer of 1991.On July 20, 1991, Leonard Jeffries of City College, who had a history of anti-Semitic slurs, presented a two-hour long speech claiming “rich Jews” financed the slave trade, and that Jews control the film industry (together with Italian mafia) and use that control to paint a brutal stereotype of blacks. Jeffries also attacked Diane Ravitch, Assistant Secretary of Education, calling her a “sophisticated Texas Jew,” “a debonair racist” and “Miss Daisy.”

Jeffries’ speech received enormous negative press during the first weeks of August, especially from the leaders of the Jewish community who wanted Jeffries fired for the bigotry.

With each new criticism of the professor, leaders in the African-American community rushed to Jeffries’ defense. The city’s two black newspapers as well as black radio station WLIB; joined activists such Al Sharpton, Colin Moore, C. Vernon Mason, Sonny Carson, and Lenora Fulani to showcase their approval of Jeffries’s “scholarship” and to denounce the people who criticized Jeffries anti-Semitism as race baiters.

Serial race-baiter Al Sharpton is credited with saying, “If the Jews want to get it on, tell them to pin their yarmulkes back and come over to my house,” as a response the Crown Heights riot. That is a fallacy; he made that threatening comment to the Jewish community about the growing Jeffries controversy on Aug. 18, the day before the riots began. Clearly something bad was coming.

Jeffries was fired because of his bigoted speech and pressure from the Jewish community (he was later reinstated and won a court case surrounding his firing) leading to further resentment of the Jews from a black community already being barraged with anti-Jewish incitement from the African-American media.

Crown Heights ignites

On Monday Aug. 19, a station wagon driven by Yosef Lifsh, hit another car and bounced onto the sidewalk at 8:21 p.m. The station wagon was part of a three-car motorcade carrying the Lubavitcher Rebbe Menachem Schneerson. The Rebbe was in a different car.The station wagon struck two black children, 7-year-old cousins Gavin and Angela Cato who were on the sidewalk. Lifsh immediately got out of his car and tried to help the children gathering crowd started to attack him.

Within minutes, an ambulance from the Hasidic-run ambulance service, and two from the city’s Emergency Medical Service arrived. Meanwhile, the gathering crowd became unruly. The police who showed up radioed for backup, reporting the station wagon’s driver and passengers were being assaulted. Police officer Nona Capace ordered the Hasidic ambulance to remove the battered Yosef Lifsh and his passenger from the scene.

The injured children went by separate city ambulances to Kings County Hospital. Gavin Cato was pronounced dead; his cousin survived.

A rumor began to spread that the Hasidic ambulance crew had ignored the dying black child in favor of treating the Jewish men. This falsehood was later used by Al Sharpton to incite the crowd. Other rumors sprang up — Lifsh was intoxicated (breath alcohol test administered by the police proved his sobriety). More falsehoods circulated — Lifsh did not have a valid driver’s license; he went through a red light; the police prevented people, including Gavin Cato’s father, from assisting in the rescue.

Charles Price, an area resident who had come to the scene of the accident, incited the masses with claims that, “The Jews get everything they want. They’re killing our children.” Price later pled guilty for inciting the crowd to murder Yankel Rosenbaum.

Ignited by the falsehoods, resentment exploded into violence. Groups of young black men threw rocks, bottles and debris at police, residents and homes.

According to the New York Times, more than 250 neighborhood residents went on a rampage that first night, mostly black teenagers, many of whom were shouting “Jews! Jews! Jews!”Three hours after the tragic crash, 29-year-old Australian Jewish scholar Yankel Rosenbaum was attacked by a gang of black teens. He was stabbed four times. Cops quickly arrested Lemrick Nelson, who was identified by Rosenbaum as his attacker. Rosenbaum’s wounds were not fatal he was expected to recover; Mayor Dinkins visited Rosenbaum at the hospital. Yankel died at 2:30am Tuesday because the hospital staff missed one of his knife wounds.

The next evening, according to the sworn testimony of Efraim Lipkind, a former Hasidic resident of Crown Heights, Sharpton started agitating the crowd.

“Then we had a famous man, Al Sharpton, who came down, and he said Tuesday night, kill the Jews, two times. I heard him, and he started to lead a charge across the street to Utica.”

With each passing hour the violence worsened, Jewish leaders began to desperately complain about the lack of protection to the authorities. The rioters were being allowed to rampage unchecked, too little force was being brought to bear, and too few arrests were being made, they said. Area Jews felt the police were under orders by the city’s first black mayor to hold back, that the police were not allowed to fight against the black rioters, who continued to grow bolder in their anti-Semitic attack as they sensed the appeasement.

The fact is Mayor David Dinkins responded to the riot immediately by deploying 2,000 police officers and making a personal visit to the troubled neighborhood under a hail of rocks and epithets hurled at him by fellow blacks.

Dinkins has spoken of his own mishandling of the riots. Admitting he “screwed up Crown Heights.”

“I regret not saying to the police brass sooner ‘whatever you guys are doing is not working’ — it was then they altered their behavior and they were able to containe the ravaging young blacks who were attacking Jews. … I will forever be accused of holding back the police and permitted blacks to attack Jews, however that did not happen, it is just inaccurate.”In all, the street violence against the Crown Heights Jews lasted three days / four nights starting with the evening of the accident. On Thursday evening, cops finally restored order, although sporadic violence against Jews continued for weeks after the riot was contained.

Yankel Rosenbaum wasn’t the only person murdered by the rioters. On Sept. 5, Anthony Graziosi, an Italian-American was dragged out of his car, brutally beaten and stabbed to death because his full beard and dark clothing caused him to be mistaken for a Hasidic Jew.

During the funeral of Gavin Cato on Aug. 26, Al Sharpton gave an anti-Semitic eulogy, which fueled the fires of hatred.

“The world will tell us he was killed by accident. Yes, it was a social accident. ... It’s an accident to allow an apartheid ambulance service in the middle of Crown Heights. ... Talk about how Oppenheimer in South Africa sends diamonds straight to Tel Aviv and deals with the diamond merchants right here in Crown Heights. The issue is not anti-Semitism; the issue is apartheid. ...

“All we want to say is what Jesus said: If you offend one of these little ones, you got to pay for it. No compromise, no meetings, no kaffe klatsch, no skinnin’ and grinnin’. Pay for your deeds.”

Sharpton and the lawyer representing the Cato family counseled them not to cooperate with authorities in the investigation and demanded a special prosecutor be named.

When Sharpton was asked about the violence, he justified it:

“We must not reprimand our children for outrage, when it is the outrage that was put in them by an oppressive system.”

The first Sabbath after the funeral, Sharpton tried unsuccessfully to kick up tensions again by marching 400 protesters in front of the Lubavitch of Crown Heights shouting “No Justice, No Peace.”

Sharpton called for the arrest of Lifsh, the driver of the station wagon. Even though more than 20 similarly accidental vehicular deaths had occurred in Brooklyn since 1989 without a single arrest — several involving local Hasidim run down by blacks. The agitator’s pressure led Brooklyn District Attorney Charles Hynes into convening a grand jury.When the investigation of the accident did not produce a criminal indictment against Yosef Lifsh, Sharpton encouraged the Cato family to seek big-bucks damages in a civil suit against Lifsh (who had since fled to Israel for his own safety). Sharpton announced that he would personally serve papers on Yosef Lifsh in Israel. He bought tickets and hopped an El-Al flight on the weekend of Yom Kippur.

Sharpton abandoned the Caribbean people of Crown Heights as soon as the anti-Semitic violence died down. His entire participation in the violence may have been a calculated effort to usurp Jesse Jackson as the leading spokesman for African-Americans. Jackson may have had his “Hymie-town” but Sharpton’s incitement against those Jews who he perceived as having the political power that African Americans deserved, went much further than simply words like those uttered by Jackson.

Sadly, had Sharpton not exploited the death of Gavin Cato for his own “resume,” what was, by all accounts, a disorganized group of ruffians on the first night of the riot, might well have dissipated the morning after the accident.

The media portrayed the Crown Heights riot as two-sided, promoting the myth that both blacks and Jews were equal in their violence. The violence was a one-sided rampage waged by some of the neighborhood’s 180,000 strong black majority against a Jewish minority of 20,000.

The Crown Heights riot occurred just five months after the infamous Rodney King beating, a disgusting act of police brutality against the African American King which was video-taped and repeated on TV ad nauseum.After the King case, who could believe that blacks in America could ever take over the role of racists? But that is what happened in Crown Heights. Even today the deaths of Gavin Cato and Yankel Rosenbaum are viewed as some sort of a “tit for tat.” This is a misrepresentation of the facts. Cato’s death was the result of a horrible accident; on the other hand, Rosenbaum was deliberately stabbed four times by an angry mob. Anthony Graziosi’s death has been forgotten perhaps because his death would break some cynical equality of fatality.

Many in the Jewish community felt Mayor Dinkins was complacent in the violence, holding back the police from protecting the Jewish community, but there has never been evidence offered proving that charge.

A more likely explanation for the lack of protection offered to the Hasidic community is a perfect storm of incompetence. An incompetent Police Commissioner Lee Brown was being managed by an incompetent mayor.

Nevertheless the pogrom dealt a death blow to Dinkins’ mayoral career. Ironically, it was the fact that Jews had voted for him in overwhelming numbers that him a narrow victory over Rudy Giuliani in 1989. Those same Jews switched sides, giving Giuliani the win against Dinkins in 1993.

As for Al Sharpton, he went on to lead a second pogrom, in 1995, against Freddy’s Fashion Mart, a Jewish-owned business in Harlem where seven people were slain.

Now, as an adviser to the Trayvon Martin family, Sharpton is again exploiting the death of a child to incite violence and build his reputation as a “civil rights leader.”

A version of this report appeared in The Jewish Star in 2011, on the 20th anniversary of the riots in Crown Heights.

The anti-"racial profiling" juggernaut must be stopped, before it obliterates the crime-fighting gains of the last decade, especially in inner cities. The anti-profiling crusade thrives on an ignorance of policing and a willful blindness to the demographics of crime. Yet politicians are swarming on board. In February, President George W. Bush joined the rush, declaring portentously: "Racial profiling is wrong, and we will end it in America."

Too bad no one asked President Bush: "What exactly do you mean by 'racial profiling,' and what evidence do you have that it exists?" For the anti-profiling crusaders have created a headlong movement without defining their central term and without providing a shred of credible evidence that "racial profiling" is a widespread police practice.

The ultimate question in the profiling controversy is whether the disproportionate involvement of blacks and Hispanics with law enforcement reflects police racism or the consequences of disproportionate minority crime. Anti-profiling activists hope to make police racism an all but irrebuttable presumption whenever enforcement statistics show high rates of minority stops and arrests. But not so fast.

Two meanings of "racial profiling" intermingle in the activists' rhetoric. What we may call "hard" profiling uses race as the only factor in assessing criminal suspiciousness: an officer sees a black person and, without more to go on, pulls him over for a pat-down on the chance that he may be carrying drugs or weapons. "Soft" racial profiling is using race as one factor among others in gauging criminal suspiciousness: the highway police, for example, have intelligence that Jamaican drug posses with a fondness for Nissan Pathfinders are transporting marijuana along the northeast corridor. A New Jersey trooper sees a black motorist speeding in a Pathfinder and pulls him over in the hope of finding drugs.

The racial profiling debate focuses primarily on highway stops. The police are pulling over a disproportionate number of minority drivers for traffic offenses, goes the argument, in order to look for drugs. Sure, the driver committed an infraction, but the reason the trooper chose to stop him, rather than the speeder next to him, was his race.

But the profiling critics also fault both the searches that sometimes follow a highway stop and the tactics of urban policing. Any evaluation of the evidence for, and the appropriateness of, the use of race in policing must keep these contexts distinct. Highway stops should almost always be color-blind, I'll argue, but in other policing environments (including highway searches), where an officer has many clues to go on, race may be among them. Ironically, effective urban policing shows that the more additional factors an officer has in his criminal profile, the more valid race becomes—and the less significant, almost to the point of irrelevance.

Before reviewing the evidence that profiling critics offer, recall the demands that the police face every day, far from anti-police agitators and their journalist acolytes.

February 22, 2001, a town-hall meeting at P.S. 153 in Harlem between New York mayor Rudolph Giuliani and Harlem residents: a woman sarcastically asks Giuliani if police officers downtown are paid more than uptown officers, "because we don't have any quality of life in Harlem, none whatsoever. Drug dealers are allowed to stand out in front of our houses every day, to practically invade us, and nothing's done about it." Another woman complains that dealers are back on the street the day after being arrested, and notes that "addicts are so bold that we have to get off the sidewalk and go around them!" She calls for the declaration of a state of emergency. A man wonders if cop-basher congressman Charles Rangel, present at the meeting, could "endow the police with more power," and suggests that the NYPD coordinate with the federal Drug Enforcement Administration, the INS, and the IRS to bring order to the streets.

The audience meets Giuliani's assertions that the police have brought crime down sharply in Harlem with hoots of derision. No one mentions "police brutality."

Valentine's Day, 2001, a police-community meeting at Harlem's 28th Precinct: an elegant man in an angora turtleneck, tiny blue glasses, and a shadow of a goatee breaks a local taboo by asking what the precinct is doing "to address dealing on the corners." Most residents shrink from mentioning the problem at precinct meetings for fear of retaliation from dealers. A tense silence falls. The man, a restaurant investor, tells me, "If this was 59th and Park, the police wouldn't allow these individuals to hang out on the corner." He can't understand why there's no "immediate result," if the police have in fact been cracking down on drug-dealing. "I don't think it should be so hard to dismantle," he says impatiently.

February 12, 2001, the fifth floor of a hulking yellow apartment building on Lenox Road in Flatbush, Brooklyn: two officers from the 67th Precinct investigate an anonymous call reporting a group of youths smoking marijuana in the hallway. The boys have disappeared. As officers check the stairwell, a gaunt middle-aged man sporting a wildly patterned black-and-white tie courteously introduces himself as Mr. Johnson, the building superintendent. After slowly bending down to pick up a discarded cigarette butt, he asks politely if anything more can be done about the kids who come from the next building to smoke pot in his hallway.

This is the demand—often angry, sometimes wistful—that urban police forces constantly hear: get rid of the drugs! These recent appeals come after the most successful war on crime that New York City has ever conducted. A decade and a half ago, when drug-related drive-by shootings became epidemic, inner-city residents nationwide were calling even more frantically for protection from drug violence. When New Jersey, a key state on the drug corridor from Central America to New England, sent its state highway troopers to do foot patrols in Camden and Trenton, residents met them with cheers.

In New York, the mayhem eventually led to the development of the Giuliani administration's assertive policing that strives, quite successfully, to prevent crime from happening. Outside of New York, the widespread pleas to stop drug violence led the Drug Enforcement Administration to enlist state highway police in their anti-drug efforts. The DEA and the Customs Service had been using intelligence about drug routes and the typical itineraries of couriers to interdict drugs at airports; now the interdiction war would expand to the nation's highways, the major artery of the cocaine trade.

The DEA taught state troopers some common identifying signs of drug couriers: nervousness; conflicting information about origin and destination cities among vehicle occupants; no luggage for a long trip; lots of cash; lack of a driver's license or insurance; the spare tire in the back seat; rental license plates or plates from key source states like Arizona and New Mexico; loose screws or scratches near a vehicle's hollow spaces, which can be converted to hiding places for drugs and guns. The agency also shared intelligence about the types of cars that couriers favored on certain routes, as well as about the ethnic makeup of drug-trafficking organizations. A typical DEA report from the early 1990s noted that "large-scale interstate trafficking networks controlled by Jamaicans, Haitians, and black street gangs dominate the manufacture and distribution of crack." The 1999 "Heroin Trends" report out of Newark declared that "predominant wholesale traffickers are Colombian, followed by Dominicans, Chinese, West African/Nigerian, Pakistani, Hispanic and Indian. Mid-levels are dominated by Dominicans, Colombians, Puerto Ricans, African-Americans and Nigerians."

According to the racial profiling crowd, the war on drugs immediately became a war on minorities, on the highways and off. Their alleged evidence for racial profiling comes in two varieties: anecdotal, which is of limited value, and statistical, which on examination proves entirely worthless.

The most notorious racial profiling anecdote may have nothing to do with racial profiling at all. On April 23, 1998, two New Jersey state troopers pulled over a van that they say was traveling at 74 miles an hour in a 55-mile-an-hour zone on the New Jersey Turnpike. As they approached on foot, the van backed toward them, knocking one trooper down, hitting the patrol car, and then getting sideswiped as it entered the traffic lane still in reverse. The troopers fired 11 rounds at the van, wounding three of the four passengers, two critically.

Attorneys for the van passengers deny that the van was speeding. The only reason the cops pulled it over, critics say, was that its occupants were black and Hispanic.

If the troopers' version of the incident proves true, it is hard to see how racial profiling enters the picture. The van's alleged speed would have legitimately drawn the attention of the police. As for the shooting: whether justified or not, it surely was prompted by the possibly deadly trajectory of the van, not the race of the occupants. Nevertheless, on talk show after talk show, in every newspaper story denouncing racial profiling, the turnpike shooting has come to symbolize the lethal dangers of "driving while black."

Less notoriously, black motorists today almost routinely claim that the only reason they are pulled over for highway stops is their race. Once they are pulled over, they say, they are subject to harassment, including traumatic searches. Some of these tales are undoubtedly true. Without question, there are obnoxious officers out there, and some officers may ignore their training and target minorities. But since the advent of video cameras in patrol cars, installed in the wake of the racial profiling controversy, most charges of police racism, testified to under oath, have been disproved as lies.

The allegation that police systematically single out minorities for unjustified law enforcement ultimately stands or falls on numbers. In suits against police departments across the country, the ACLU and the Justice Department have waved studies aplenty allegedly demonstrating selective enforcement. None of them holds up to scrutiny.

The typical study purports to show that minority motorists are subject to disproportionate traffic stops. Trouble is, no one yet has devised an adequate benchmark against which to measure if police are pulling over, searching, or arresting "too many" blacks and Hispanics. The question must always be: too many compared with what? Even anti-profiling activists generally concede that police pull drivers over for an actual traffic violation, not for no reason whatsoever, so a valid benchmark for stops would be the number of serious traffic violators, not just drivers. If it turns out that minorities tend to drive more recklessly, say, or have more equipment violations, you'd expect them to be subject to more stops. But to benchmark accurately, you'd also need to know the number of miles driven by different racial groups, so that you'd compare stops per man-mile, not just per person. Throw in age demographics as well: if a minority group has more young people—read: immature drivers—than whites do, expect more traffic stops of that group. The final analysis must then compare police deployment patterns with racial driving patterns: if more police are on the road when a higher proportion of blacks are driving—on weekend nights, say—stops of blacks will rise.

No traffic-stop study to date comes near the requisite sophistication. Most simply compare the number of minority stops with some crude population measure, and all contain huge and fatal data gaps. An ACLU analysis of Philadelphia traffic stops, for example, merely used the percentage of blacks in the 1990 census as a benchmark for stops made seven years later. In about half the stops that the ACLU studied, the officer did not record the race of the motorist. The study ignored the rate of traffic violations by race, so its grand conclusion of selective enforcement is meaningless.

Only two studies, both by Temple University social psychologist John Lamberth, have attempted to create a violator benchmark. The ACLU used one to sue, successfully, the Maryland state police; a criminal defense attorney in New Jersey used the other to free 17 accused black drug traffickers. Lamberth alleged that blacks in Maryland and southern New Jersey were stopped at higher rates than their representation in the violator population would seemingly warrant. But he defined violator so broadly—in Maryland, traveling at least one mile, and in New Jersey, traveling at least six miles, over the speed limit—that he included virtually the entire driving population. Lamberth must not have spent much time talking to real cops, for his definition of violator ignores how police actually decide whom to stop. Someone gliding sedately at 56 mph in a 55 mph zone has a radically different chance of being pulled over than someone barreling along at 80. An adequate benchmark must capture the kind of driving likely to draw police attention. Despite his severely flawed methodology, Lamberth is in great demand as a racial profiling guru.

Do minorities commit more of the kinds of traffic violations that police target? This is a taboo question among the racial profiling crowd; to ask it is to reveal one's racism. No one has studied it. But some evidence suggests that it may be the case. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration found that blacks were 10 percent of drivers nationally, 13 percent of drivers in fatal accidents, and 16 percent of drivers in injury accidents. (Lower rates of seat-belt use may contribute to these numbers.) Random national surveys of drivers on weekend nights in 1973, 1986, and 1996 found that blacks were more likely to fail breathalyzer tests than whites. In Illinois, blacks have a higher motorist fatality rate than whites. Blacks in one New Jersey study were 23 percent of all drivers arrested at the scene of an accident for driving drunk, though only 13.5 percent of highway users. In San Diego, blacks have more accidents than their population figures would predict. Hispanics get in a disproportionate number of accidents nationally.

But though the numbers to date are incapable of telling us anything about racial profiling, that does not mean that it was not going on in some locations, at some times. Hard racial profiling in car stops—pulling over one speeder among many just because he happens to be black or Hispanic—has surely been rare. But conversations with officers in strong interdiction states such as New Jersey suggest that some troopers probably did practice soft racial profiling—pulling someone over because driver and car and direction and number and type of occupants fit the components of a courier profile.

Over time, officers' experience had corroborated the DEA intelligence reports: minorities were carrying most of the drugs. An example of the patterns they noticed: a group of young blacks with North Carolina plates traveling south out of Manhattan's Lincoln Tunnel into New Jersey? Good chance they're carrying weapons and drugs, having just made a big buy in the city. Catch them northbound? Good chance they're carrying big money and guns. Some officers inevitably started playing the odds—how many, the numbers cannot yet tell us.

Despite the hue and cry, there is nothing illegal about using race as one factor among others in assessing criminal suspiciousness. Nevertheless, the initial decision to pull a car over should be based almost always on seriousness of traffic violation alone—unless, of course, evidence of other law-breaking, such as drug use, is visible. If the result is that drug couriers assiduously observe the speed limit, fine. But compared with most other policing environments, highways are relatively cueless places. In assessing the potential criminality of a driver speeding along with the pack on an eight-lane highway, an officer normally has much less to work with than on a city street or sidewalk. His locational cues—traveling on an interstate pointed toward a drug market, say—are crude, compared with those in a city, where an officer can ask if this particular block is a drug bazaar. His ability to observe the behavior of a suspect over time is limited by the speed of travel. In such an environment, blacks traveling 78 mph should not face a greater chance of getting pulled over than white speeders just because they are black and happen to be driving a car said to be favored by drug mules.

Soft racial profiling was probably not widespread enough to have influenced traffic-stop rates significantly. Nor will eliminating it quickly change the belief among many blacks that any time they get stopped for a traffic violation, it is because of their race. Nevertheless, state police commanders should eliminate any contribution that soft profiling may make to that perception, unless strong evidence emerges (as it has not so far) that soft profiling has had an extremely high success rate in drug interdiction. Far more is at stake here than the use of race in traffic stops. Specious anti-racial profiling analysis threatens to emasculate policing in areas where drug enforcement is on a far stronger basis.

The most important victory of the anti-racial profiling agitators occurred not on the traffic-stop battlefield, but on the very different terrain of the searches that sometimes follow a stop. And here is where people who care about law enforcement should really start to worry. On April 20, 1999, New Jersey's then-attorney general Peter Verniero issued his "Interim Report of the State Police Review Team Regarding Allegations of Racial Profiling." It was a bombshell, whose repercussions haven't stopped yet.

"The problem of disparate treatment [of blacks] is real, not imagined," the report famously declared. Governor Christine Todd Whitman chimed in: "There is no question that racial profiling exists at some level." The media triumphantly broadcast the findings as conclusive proof of racial profiling not just in the Garden State but nationally. The New York Times started regularly referring to New Jersey's "racial bias" on the highways as incontrovertible fact. Defense attorneys and their clients celebrated as well. "Whenever I have a state police case, I file a suppression motion . . . alleging that the stop was based on color of skin and therefore illegal," a Trenton criminal defense attorney told the New York Times. "And now guess what? The state agrees with me!"

Yet the report's influential analysis is shoddy beyond belief. Contrary to popular perception, Verniero did not reach any conclusions about racial profiling in stops. His finding of "disparate treatment" is based on the percentage of "consent searches" performed on minorities after a stop has occurred. (In a consent search, the motorist agrees to allow the trooper to search his car and person, without a warrant or probable cause.) Between 1994 and 1998, claims the report, 53 percent of consent searches on the southern end of the New Jersey Turnpike involved a black person, 21 percent involved whites, and overall, 77 percent involved minorities. But these figures are meaningless, because Verniero does not include racial information about search requests that were denied, and his report mixes stops, searches, and arrests from different time periods.

But most important: Verniero finds culpable racial imbalance in the search figures without suggesting a proper benchmark. He simply assumes that 53 percent black consent searches is too high. Compared with what? If blacks in fact carry drugs at a higher rate than do whites, then this search rate merely reflects good law enforcement. If the police are now to be accused of racism every time that they go where the crime is, that's the end of public safety.

The hue and cry over the alleged New Jersey search rate makes sense only if we assume that drug trafficking is spread evenly across the entire population and that officers are unable to detect the signs of a courier once they have pulled over a car. There are powerful reasons to reject both these assumptions.

Judging by arrest rates, minorities are vastly overrepresented among drug traffickers. Blacks make up over 60 percent of arrests in New Jersey for drugs and weapons, though they are 13.5 percent of the population. Against such a benchmark, the state police search rates look proportionate.

The attorney general's report dismissed this comparison with an argument that has become de rigueur among the anti-racial profiling crowd, even in Congress: the "circularity" argument. Arrest and conviction data for drugs and weapons are virtually meaningless, said Verniero. They tell you nothing about the world and everything about the false stereotypes that guide the police. If the police find more contraband on blacks and Hispanics, that is merely because they are looking harder for it, driven by prejudiced assumptions. If the police were to target whites with as much enforcement zeal, goes this reasoning, they would find comparable levels of criminality. David Harris, a University of Toledo law school professor and the leading expert for the anti-profiling forces, makes this preposterous argument. An enforcement effort directed at 40-year-old white law professors, he assures a Senate subcommittee, would yield noticeable busts. The disproportionate minority arrests then reinforce the initial, racist stereotypes, and the vicious cycle begins all over again—too many minorities arrested, too many whites going free.

The circularity argument is an insult to law enforcement and a prime example of the anti-police advocates' willingness to rewrite reality. Though it is hard to prove a negative—in this case, that there is not a large cadre of white drug lords operating in the inner cities—circumstantial evidence rebuts the activists' insinuation. Between 1976 and 1994, 64 percent of the homicide victims in drug turf wars were black, according to a Heritage Foundation analysis of FBI data. Sixty-seven percent of known perpetrators were also black. Likewise, some 60 percent of victims and perpetrators in drug-induced fatal brawls are black. These figures match the roughly 60 percent of drug offenders in state prison who are black. Unless you believe that white traffickers are less violent than black traffickers, the arrest, conviction, and imprisonment rate for blacks on drug charges appears consistent with the level of drug activity in the black population. (And were it true that white dealers are less violent, wouldn't we expect police to concentrate their enforcement efforts on the most dangerous parts of the drug trade?)

The notion that there are lots of heavy-duty white dealers sneaking by undetected contradicts the street experience of just about every narcotics cop you will ever talk to—though such anecdotal evidence, of course, would fail to convince the ACLU, convinced as it is of the blinding racism that afflicts most officers. "The hard-core sellers are where the hard-core users are—places like 129th Street in Harlem," observes Patrick Harnett, retired chief of the narcotics division for the NYPD. "It's not white kids from Rockland County who are keeping black sellers in business."

The cops go where the deals are. When white club owners, along with Israelis and Russians, still dominated the Ecstasy trade, that's whom the cops were arresting. Recently, however, big shipments have been going to minority neighborhoods; subsequent arrests will reflect crime intelligence, not racism.

There's not a single narcotics officer who won't freely admit that there are cocaine buys going down in the men's bathrooms of Wall Street investment firms—though at a small fraction of the amount found on 129th Street. But that is not where community outrage, such as that Mayor Giuliani heard in Harlem, is directing the police, because they don't produce violence and street intimidation.

Ultimately, the circularity argument rests on a massive denial of reality, one that is remarkably vigorous and widespread. In March, 2000, for example, New Jersey senator Robert Torricelli asserted before then-senator John Ashcroft's Judiciary Subcommittee: "Statistically it cannot bear evidence [sic] to those who suggest, as our former superintendent of the state police suggested, that certain ethnic or racial groups disproportionately commit crimes. They do not." Needless to say, Torricelli did not provide any statistics.

The second condition necessary to explain the higher minority search rates on the highway is patrol officers' ability to detect drug trafficking. Unlike the initial decision to pull over a car, the decision to request permission to search rests on a wealth of cues. One of the most frequent is conflicting narratives among passengers and driver. "If a group in a car is carrying drugs, there will always be inconsistencies in their stories," reports Ed Lennon, head of the New Jersey Troopers Union. "It's unbelievable. A lot of times the driver won't know the passengers' first or last names—'I only know him as Bill'—or they'll get the names completely wrong. Sometimes they'll have a preplanned answer regarding their destination, but their purpose in being on the road will vary."

A driver's demeanor may also be a tip-off. "I've stopped white guys in pick-up trucks with a camper compartment on top," recalls Lennon. "Their chest is pounding; they're sweating, though it's the dead of winter. They won't look at you." And they're also hiding drugs.

Once a trooper stops a car, he can see the amount of luggage and its fit with the alleged itinerary, the accumulation of trash that suggests long stretches without stopping, the signs of drug use, the lack of a license and registration, the single key in the ignition and no trunk key, or the signs that the vehicle may have been fitted out with drug and weapon compartments. Some New York narcotics officers recently pulled over an Azusa SUV and noticed welding marks along the rain gutter on top. The occupants had raised the entire roof four inches to create a drug vault. If a car's windows don't roll all the way down, drugs may be concealed in the doors.

The fact that hit rates for contraband tend to be equal across racial groups, even though blacks and Hispanics are searched at higher rates, suggests that the police are successfully targeting dealers, not minorities. Race may play a role in that targeting, or it may not. Most cues of trafficking are race-neutral; it may be that race often correlates with the decision to search rather than causing it. But if race does play a role in the request to search, it is a much diminished one compared with a car stop based on a courier profile. When an officer has many independent indices of suspicion, adding his knowledge of the race of major trafficking groups to the mix is both legitimate and not overly burdensome on law-abiding minorities.

Amazingly, Attorney General Verniero acknowledges that the police merely try to maximize their hit rates in deciding whom to search, but he blames them for doing so. "The state police reward system gave practical impetus to the use of these inappropriate stereotypes about drug dealers" by rewarding big busts, he frets. But if the police were seeking to maximize their contraband yields, and the alleged "inappropriate stereotypes" were not helping them do so, presumably they would abandon those "stereotypes" and find some other set of cues—unless, of course, they were merely out to harass minorities for the thrill of it. But in that case, their hit rates would be lower for minorities than for whites, which they were not.

The bottom line is this: the New Jersey attorney general has branded the state police as racist without a scintilla of analysis for his finding. Yet New Jersey is the wave of the future, for racial profiling data-collection initiatives are sweeping the country. At least 30 states could soon require their state police to collect racial data on all traffic stops and searches, with the stated end of eliminating "racial profiling." Urban forces are under identical pressure. Virtually every major law-enforcement organization opposes these bills, because of their failure to deal with the benchmarking problem. Until someone devises an adequately sophisticated benchmark that takes into account population patterns on the roads, degrees of law-breaking, police deployment patterns, and the nuances of police decision making, stop data are as meaningless as they are politically explosive. Attorney General John Ashcroft has encouraged these data-gathering initiatives; he should instead withhold his support, unless local proponents can prove that they will capture the complex realities of law enforcement.

Unfortunately, the flurry of racial profiling analysis is not confined to the highways. It will wreak the most havoc on urban policing. Despite the racket by protesters, it is in city policing that race probably plays its least significant role, because officers have so many other cues from the environment. In assessing whether a pedestrian is behaving suspiciously, for example, they might already know that he is at a drug corner, about which they have received numerous complaints. They know if there has been a string of burglaries in the neighborhood. As they observe him, they can assess with whom he is interacting, and how.

A New York Street Crime Unit sergeant in Queens describes having stopped white pedestrians who had immediately changed directions as soon as they saw his unmarked car or ducked into an alley or a store for eight seconds and then looked for him once they came out. The night I spoke to him, he was patrolling the 102nd Precinct in Woodhaven, a largely white and Hispanic neighborhood. He had earlier questioned a white kid hanging out in front of a factory. "He was breaking his neck looking back at us; we thought he was a burglar." It turns out he was waiting for a friend. Another night in another precinct, the sergeant saw two black kids on bikes. "One guy's arm was hanging straight down, like he was carrying a gun. When they saw us, the other guy took off on his bike and threw a bag away. It was felony-weight drugs." Are you ignoring whites with guns? I asked him. "Of course not; I could see the same thing tonight," he said impatiently. "I don't use race at all. The only question is: are you raising my level of suspicion? Fifteen minutes after a stop, I may not even be able to tell you the color of the guy."

Even car stops on city streets usually have more context than on a highway. "If we pass four or five guys in a car going the opposite direction," explains the Queens sergeant, "and they're all craning their necks to see if we notice them, we may reverse and follow them for a while. We won't pull them over, but our suspicion is up. We'll run their plates. If the plates don't check out, they're done. If they commit a traffic violation, we won't pull everyone out of the car yet; we'll just interview the driver. If he doesn't have paperwork, it may be a stolen car. Now everyone's coming out to be frisked."

Hard as it is to believe, criminals actually do keep turning around to look at officers, though it would seem an obvious give-away. "Thank God they're stupid, or we'd be out of a job," the sergeant laughs.

But urban policing depends on another race-neutral strength: it is data-driven. The greatest recent innovation in policing was New York's Compstat, the computer-generated crime analysis that allows police commanders to pinpoint their enforcement efforts, then allows top brass to hold them accountable for results. If robberies are up in Bushwick, Brooklyn, the precinct commander will strategically deploy his officers to find the perpetrators. Will all the suspects be black? Quite likely, for so is the neighborhood. Does that mean that the officers are racist? Hardly; they are simply going where the crime is. In most high-crime neighborhoods, race is wholly irrelevant to policing, because nearly all the residents are minorities.

Urban police chiefs worry about the data-collection mania as much as highway patrol commanders do. Ed Flynn, chief of police for Virginia's Arlington County, explains why. Last year, the black community in his jurisdiction was demanding heavier drug enforcement. "We had a series of community meetings. The residents said to us: 'Years ago, you had control over the problem. Now the kids are starting to act out again.' They even asked us: 'Where are your jump-out squads [who observe drug deals from their cars, then jump out and nab the participants]?' " So Flynn and his local commander put together an energetic strategy to break up the drug trade. They instituted aggressive motor-vehicle checks throughout the problem neighborhood. Cracked windshield, too-dark windows, expired tags, driving too fast? You're getting stopped and questioned. "We wanted to increase our presence in the area and make it quite unpleasant for the dealers to operate," Flynn says. The Arlington officers also cracked down on quality-of-life offenses like public urination, and used undercover surveillance to take out the dealers.

By the end of the summer, the department had cleaned up the crime hot spots. Community newsletters thanked the cops for breaking up the dealing. But guess what? Says Flynn: "We had also just generated a lot of data showing 'disproportionate' minority arrests." The irony, in Flynn's view, is acute. "We are responding to heartfelt demands for increased police presence," he says. "But this places police departments in the position of producing data at the community's behest that can be used against them."

The racial profiling analysis profoundly confuses cause and effect. "Police develop tactics in response to the disproportionate victimization of minorities by minorities, and you are calling the tactics the problem?" Flynn marvels.

However much the racial profilers try to divert attention away from the facts of crime, those facts remain obdurate. Arlington has a 10 percent black population, but robbery victims identify nearly 70 percent of their assailants as black. In 1998, blacks in New York City were 13 times more likely than whites to commit a violent assault, according to victim reports. As long as those numbers remain unchanged, police statistics will also look disproportionate. This is the crime problem that black leaders should be shouting about.

But the politics of racial profiling has taken over everything else. Here again, New Jersey is a model of profiling pandering, and it foreshadows the irrationality that will beset the rest of the country. In February 1999, New Jersey governor Christine Todd Whitman peremptorily fired the head of the state police, Colonel Carl Williams, whose reputation for honesty had earned him the nickname "The Truth." It was the truth that got him fired. The day before his dismissal, Williams had had the temerity to tell a newspaper reporter that minority groups dominate the cocaine and marijuana trade.

Of course, this information had constituted the heart of DEA reports for years. No matter. Stating it publicly violated some collective fairy tale that all groups commit drug crimes at equal rates. Whitman's future political career depended on getting Williams's head, and she got it. One scapegoat was not enough, however. The New Jersey state troopers who shot at the van are now on trial for attempted murder—a wildly trumped-up charge—and the attorney general has been prosecuting the case in a flagrantly political fashion.

One way to make sure that nasty confrontations with the facts about crime don't happen again is to stop publishing those facts. And so the New Jersey state police no longer distribute a typical felony-offender profile to their officers, because such profiles may contribute, in the attorney general's words, to "inappropriate stereotypes" about criminals. Never mind that in law enforcement, with its deadly risk, more information is always better than less. Expect calls for the barring of racial information from crime analysis to spread nationally.

The New Jersey attorney general's office has also dropped its appeal of a devastating 1996 trial court decision that had declared the state police guilty of "institutional racism." Using Lamberth's New Jersey traffic study as proof of racial profiling, the court dismissed drug indictments against 17 blacks without so much as glancing at the facts of their cases. The court was wrong on the evidence and wrong on the law, but the case now stands permanently on the books as the most important judicial decision to date on racial profiling.

Next, the New Jersey attorney general himself dismissed en masse drug and weapons charges against 128 defendants. The defendants all alleged that state troopers had pulled them over merely because of race. The attorney general was not willing to defend the state's officers and so let the defendants go free. In one case, the defendants' car allegedly passed a marked cruiser at 75 miles an hour; the occupants were openly smoking pot and drinking; the trooper found cocaine—hardly a case of racial profiling, hard or soft. Numerous requests to the attorney general's office for comment on the case have gone unanswered.

New Jersey will soon monitor the length of traffic stops that individual officers make and correlate it to the race of the motorist. It will also monitor by race the computer checks that individual officers run on license plates, on the theory that racist officers will spend more time bothering innocent black motorists and will improperly target them for background checks. Of course an officer's stop and arrest data will be closely scrutinized for racial patterns as well. And if in fact such investigatory techniques correlate with race because more minorities are breaking the law? Too bad for the cop. He will be red-flagged as a potential racist.

These programs monitoring individual officers are present in all jurisdictions that, like New Jersey, operate under a federal monitor. Along with the new state requirements for racial data collection on a department-wide basis, they will destroy assertive policing, for they penalize investigatory work. The political classes are telling police officers that if they have "too many" enforcement interactions with minorities, it is because they are racists. Officers are responding by cutting back enforcement. Drug arrests dropped 55 percent on the Garden State Parkway in New Jersey in 2000, and 25 percent on the turnpike and parkway combined. When the mayor and the police chief of Minneapolis accused Minneapolis officers of racial profiling, traffic stops dropped 63 percent. Pittsburgh officers, under a federal consent decree monitoring their individual enforcement actions, now report that they are arresting by racial quota. Arrests in Los Angeles, whose police department has been under fire from the Justice Department, dropped 25 percent in the first nine months of 2000, while homicides jumped 25 percent.

The Harlem residents who so angrily demanded more drug busts from Mayor Giuliani last February didn't care about the race of the criminals who were destroying their neighborhood. They didn't see "black" or "white." They only saw dealers—and they wanted them out. That is precisely the perspective of most police officers as well; their world is divided into "good people" and "bad people," not into this race or that.

If the racial profiling crusade shatters this commonality between law-abiding inner-city residents and the police, it will be just those law-abiding minorities who will pay the heaviest price.

Racial Profiling: The Myth that Never DiesThe ACLU says the debate is over. Is it really? By Jack Dunphy

More than seven years ago, Heather Mac Donald wrote “The Myth of Racial Profiling” for the Manhattan Institute’s quarterly, City Journal. “The anti-profiling crusade,” Mac Donald wrote, “thrives on an ignorance of policing and a willful blindness to the demographics of crime.” This ignorance persists, and last week saw the arrival of yet another shining example of it. But, unlike the bleating from such charlatans as Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson, this latest bit of ignorance comes cloaked in the legitimizing finery of Ivy League science.

Last Monday, the ACLU of Southern California released a report titled “A Study of Racially Disparate Outcomes in the Los Angeles Police Department,” by Ian Ayres, a professor at Yale Law School, and Jonathan Borowsky, formerly a research assistant at Yale Law School and currently a student at Harvard Law School. The study examined data collected during pedestrian and vehicle stops made by LAPD officers from July 2003 to June 2004. “We find prima facie evidence,” write Ayres and Borowsky, “that African Americans and Hispanics are over-stopped, over-frisked, over-searched, and over-arrested.” Among their more detailed conclusions are these:

Per 10,000 residents, the black stop rate is 3,400 stops higher than the white stop rate, and the Hispanic stop rate is almost 360 stops higher.

Relative to stopped whites, stopped blacks are 127% more likely and stopped Hispanics are 43% more likely to be frisked.

Relative to stopped whites, stopped blacks are 76% more likely and stopped Hispanics are 16% more likely to be searched.

Relative to stopped whites, stopped blacks are 29% more likely and stopped Hispanics are 32% more likely to be arrested.

Damning stuff, says the ACLU, which commissioned the study. In an accompanying letter to the Los Angeles police commission, ACLU staff attorney Peter Bibring writes that “Prof. Ayres’s report ends debate about the existence of the problem and validates the experience in communities of color of police interactions attributable to ‘driving while black’ or ‘driving while brown.’”

Rubbish.

First of all, to claim that a study commissioned by an interest group, especially one as driven by ideology as the ACLU, is so irrefutably grounded in fact as to end debate on the matter is the very height of arrogance. Furthermore, the Ayres report has been neither peer-reviewed nor published in any scientific journal. That the report’s conclusions reflect the beliefs of the organization that paid for it should come as a surprise to no one. Indeed, the ACLU may have selected Mr. Ayres on the basis of his keen ability to detect racial bias nearly everywhere he looks. He has previously published books and articles on the hidden racial components involved in setting bail, purchasing automobiles, and tipping taxicab drivers.

Also, if the ACLU had truly been intent on ending the debate, they might have chosen a researcher whose résumé is less blemished by controversy. Last October, the Yale Daily News reported that Ayres’s latest book, Super Crunchers: Why Thinking-By-Numbers Is the New Way to Be Smart, contained passages that were “unattributed verbatim reproductions or nearly identical paraphrases of passages from various newspaper and magazine articles published in the last twenty years.” Ayres apologized for the “errors,” and said his publisher would make the appropriate changes in any future printings of the book.

Putting aside niggling questions of citations and quotations marks in his earlier work, Ayres’s report on the LAPD should stand or fall on its own merits. The reader can well imagine what my own opinion on the report might be, but my position as an LAPD officer may invite skepticism as to my objectivity. So I invited a respected academian to read the Ayres report and offer his opinion on its research methods and conclusions.

David Klinger is an associate professor of criminology and criminal justice at the University of Missouri – St. Louis, and the author of Into the Kill Zone: A Cop’s Eye View of Deadly Force. He is himself a former police officer, having served with the LAPD and the Redmond, Wash. police department. But he is no shill for cops: he has testified as an expert witness both for and against police officers in civil cases arising from use-of-force incidents.

Klinger expressed a number of reservations on the Ayres report, beginning with its reliance on population figures in calculating what it labels as excessive stops, searches, and arrests of blacks and Hispanics in Los Angeles. In an e-mail to me, Klinger wrote that Ayres’s use of the racial and/or ethnic composition of a given area as expressed in census data is not sound. The key question is not who lives in a given area, says Klinger, but rather who is actually present in the area and interacting with the police.

For example, the Ayres report identifies two LAPD patrol divisions (out of eighteen) where the “stop rate” for blacks actually exceeded the number of blacks living in those areas. These disparities are easily explained, yet the report makes only a passing effort at doing so. “Residents can be stopped more than once,” write Ayres and Borowsky, “and non-residents who travel into a division can also be stopped.”

This last point bears further explication which Ayres and Borowsky do not provide. For example, they fail to account for the large number of homeless men living in downtown Los Angeles, where, according to their report, the number of blacks stopped exceeded the number of blacks living in the area. In recent years a large amount of unused office and industrial space in downtown L.A. has been converted into condominiums and lofts, the residents of which are for the most part white and fairly affluent. But the LAPD’s Central Division is also home to the city’s Skid Row, whose “residents” sleep outdoors or in homeless shelters and often go uncounted in census tabulations. These homeless men are overwhelmingly black, and their numbers include a large contingent of paroled felons and others with long criminal records. Consider: if you were a police officer in downtown Los Angeles, and you were interested in curtailing crime on your beat, on which group would you focus your efforts, the white, yuppie condo dwellers or the black ex-cons?

The situation is similar in Hollywood Division, where the black population is no more than six or seven percent. Unexamined in the Ayres report is the fact that Hollywood is home to many nightclubs that regularly attract large numbers of black gang members from South Central Los Angeles and elsewhere. These gang members are responsible for a disproportionate amount of the crimes committed in Hollywood, most especially violent crimes, and thus are far more likely to attract the attention of the police.

The biggest problem with the Ayres report, says Klinger, is that it presents no ethnic- or race-based crime information, i.e. the amount of crime actually committed by blacks and Hispanics. “Ayres admits this is a liability,” said Klinger in his e-mail to me, “but downplays it and uses ‘indirect benchmarks’ (last paragraph of page 27) to try to overcome this problem. I find this practice quite wanting.” Klinger went on to say that Ayres and Borowsky were “speaking beyond the data” in that they did not include in their analysis a critical variable that even they admit must be taken into account in order to draw valid conclusions.

Though LAPD Chief William Bratton was critical of the Ayres report, he has as yet failed to disclose the information Klinger found lacking, information that is readily available and would surely refute the report’s bottom line, to wit, that blacks in Los Angeles, and to a lesser extent Hispanics, commit crimes at a far greater rate than do whites, and are therefore subjected to a greater level of attention from police officers on patrol. If one accepts the murder rate as a benchmark for measuring violent crime, the racial disparities are indeed striking. In 2007, the LAPD investigated 394 murders. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, the population of Los Angeles is 9.6 percent black, yet of those 394 murder victims, 134, or 34 percent, were black. And of the 354 identified murder suspects, 129 (36 percent) were black. The number of Hispanic murder victims and suspects roughly mirror the overall Hispanic population in Los Angeles. Hispanics make up 49 percent of the city’s population, and last year 54 percent of its murder victims and 55 percent of its murder suspects were also Hispanic. (Whites are about 29 percent of L.A.’s population, but in 2007 they made up just 8 percent of its murder victims and 7 percent of its known murder suspects. The nationwide murder figures reflect a similar racial disparity, as revealed here.)

Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa was once president of the L.A. chapter of the ACLU, and the rest of the city government is composed almost entirely of like-minded liberals. They are far too committed to politically correct ideals to disclose the cold and persistent facts that LAPD cops, indeed cops all over the country, know all too well: that the murder statistics cited above are also reflected in every other category of violent crime. Far from being over, the debate over racial profiling will continue for as long as these racial disparities in crime rates do.

— Jack Dunphy is an officer in the Los Angeles Police Department. “Jack Dunphy” is the author’s nom de cyber. The opinions expressed are his own and almost certainly do not reflect those of the LAPD management.

'Dark ones': The left attacks Hillsdale's president because they can't control himPublished by: Herman Cain

Ridiculous.

Liberals hate Michigan’s Hillsdale College, which not only celebrates a decidedly conservative point of view, but also galls them by refusing to take government funding – which means they have no way of threatening Hillsdale and trying to force it to fall in line. It’s no surprise, then, that liberals and their media allies are trying to manufacture a scandal over Hillsdale President Larry Arnn’s use of the phrase “dark ones” during testimony before the Michigan Legislature.

They are trying to say Arnn is racist because he “described minorities as ‘dark ones.’” What he actually did, however, was describe the arguably racist actions of state bureaucrats who invaded his campus to play diversity police.

Arnn told a legislative committee at the state capital that bureaucrats from the Michigan Department of Education showed up at Hillsdale’s campus in 2000, wandering around with clipboards looking at the faces of students and writing down what they saw.

“What were they looking for besides dark ones?” he said.

Scandal!

Members of the committee gasped, scolded Arnn and suggested that he had better apologize. The news media went to work immediately, churning out stories announcing that Arnn “described minorities as ‘dark ones’” while burying the context of his statement, if they explained it at all. The usual race-mongers declared that context didn’t matter because the simple, literal, descriptive two-word phrase was so offensive.

The Rev. Charles Williams II, president of the Michigan chapter of the National Action Network – whatever that is – demanded that Hillsdale funders denounce Arnn, and warned darkly (uh oh, can I say that?) that if they do not, “we will be very strategic in how we deal with any of their industries and venues.”

I am so tired of this nonsense. In case you haven’t noticed, there are a lot of black people, and some have darker complexions than others. I am one of the dark ones!

Now, having said that, I could spend the rest of the day figuring out how to boycott myself for offending myself, but I think I will skip that absurd exercise because all I did was tell you what I look like.

You want to know a secret? Normal, everyday black Americans do not sit around getting offended because some college president, or politician, or celebrity, or media person, or talk show host, or whoever . . . used some phrase. It is not important and we do not care. But there is a whole industry that consists of people who do nothing but sit around and wait for someone to utter a phrase to which they can take offense. And when it happens, they pounce, and the media does their bidding.Oh, and when the person who utters the phrase is an identifiable conservative – bar the door. It’s outrage time. Crank out the press releases. Organize the boycotts. Demand retribution. It’s your moment in the sun when you are a professional offense-monger.

And in the midst of all this, the media completely missed the real story. Arnn was describing an action of state bureaucrats that was totally inappropriate – showing up on his campus with clipboards and counting how many black faces they saw. In the aftermath of Arnn’s testimony, the Michigan Department of Education denied this had ever taken place – until admitting yesterday that it did.

Oh, by the way, conservative Hillsdale was the first private college in the nation to bar discrimination on the basis of race, sex or religion in its charter. That fact has shown up in a few of the media stories, but it’s buried underneath all the faux outrage over Arnn’s dastardly utterance.

Stand strong, Dr. Arnn! The left is attacking you not because you said anything wrong – you didn’t – but because you lead a conservative institution that doesn’t take their money and can’t be controlled by them. To them, that makes you a target. To this “dark one,” it makes you a hero.

Many exchanges with her of the Manhattan Institute-cousin to the Hoover Institute and Heritage Foundation, institutions that seem to have knee jerk reactions to anything that questions their skewed view of justice and their sense of entitlement for totalitarianism.

Let's talk about Skid Row. I lived in Skid Row from Feb.7, 2007 to December 29, 2009. I worked there from March 2008 to May 2010. I was neither a loftee nor a homeless individual. Yet, I knew both. I was a survivor. And yes, I am an Ivy Leaguer. I was ordered by a judge to live there while fighting a ridiculous criminal case. I know everyone in Skid Row.I count LAPD commander Andy Smith, formerly of the Central Division as a friend. Senior Lead Officer Deon Joseph will attest to my fairness and objectivity. I was invited on numerous occasions by Sgt Kevin Royce and Commander Smith to speak to the officers at morning roll call. Why? As the Firemen from Station 9 on Seventh St, the busiest paramedic team in the City, stated in bright red letters on their landing page,"If you want to learn about Skid Row, read Scribeskidrow. He will tell you the truth about Skidrow like no one else can!!!.". Scribeskidrow is critically acclaimed by the New Yorker and law enforcement officers around the country. It continues to be on the blog roll of Blogdowntown, the premiere news source for the downtown Denizens. I am Scribeskidrow.

Racial profiling was not the case for Skid Row. Class profiling was rampant. Under that homeless umbrella was the certainty that those on the street were defenseless to protect themselves from brutality. Yes, felons live in Skid Row but but so do the mentally ill. Yes, you have your schemers but you have your cruelly disabled. Yes you have those who scam the government with Red, White and Blue medi-caid fraud while many others would die if they received no care. Yes, 90% of the residents of Skid Row receive Public Assistance, and Disability. Those Government transfer payments that amount to approximately $5,000,000/month formed the flooring that sustained downtown merchants during the recession. And I am not even calculating the multiplier effect.

I know that during the Triumvirate of the City Attorney's office, LAPD and the Mayor's Office, great strides were made to reach out to that community and restore a bit of humaneness. Work was done to establish cordial relations between LAPD and the community. Mutual respect, programs etc. Skid Row 3 on 3 basketball league was formed. The City Attorney office paid for uniforms. Games between the Skid Row All Stars and the LAPD continue to this day. Further evidence of the outreach police extended was Sargent Royce inviting me to his home for Thanksgiving and Christmas while I was there. I can't tell you how much that helped me survive. We are great friends to this day. We argue about politics because he is to the right of Attila the Hun. But I would give my life to save his. And Sargent Royce and all those officers would never agree with Heather Mac Donald. I know because I talked to them. Much more progress would have been made had it not been for the obstructionist tactics of that idiotic mayor Villaraigosa who was not pleased that Rocky Delgadillo was receiving much more press than he. Delgadillo was no angel but he was a friend to that community.And Skid Row is a community to be respected like any other. People live there are concerned about crime just like anywhere else.

So, I suggest that we not use the broad stroke of brush complete with ad hominem splashes on canvas to support claims to justify untenable behavior. I support the LAPD; But I know bullshit when I see it and I observed more than I care to remember after Andy Smith, Captain Kathy McDonald and that entire regime left. It reverted back to Gestapo ways. Racial profiling had nothing to do with it. Homeless, class profiling had everything to do with it.

GM, your statements reveal complexity containing the unique dichotomy of insight and bias. (as mine probably do). I shall ponder all that you share.Certainly you are forcing me to go to the mental gymnasium pulling out this and that book from my library. I both curse you and thank you.

6th and Gladys, the most notorious drug corner in Skid Row where activity was squashed during the Andy Smith era only to return to business as usual after he left. Drug dealers sell with impunity while, if anyone that could be characterized by an LAPD officer as a Skid Row resident even looked like they wanted to cross Los Angeles Street, they were pulled over and shaken down. I know it because I saw it. Never happened to me because I did not look like a Skid Row resident. I lived there but looked like what we be characterized as a typical Ivy Leaguer. And Yes, I am black. So race had nothing to do with any of it. When I crossed Los Angeles streets and hung out in the Loft district, I was never eyed. Now, had it been 1940's, and if blacks were seen crossing Western Ave by officers posted at the Western Ave intersections, then that would have been racial profiling. My father and his peers shared those stories with me.

And yes, I was on Wall Street for quite some time. I note here that I often chuckled at the irony that Wall Street is also a main street in Skid Row on which the LA Central Division sits.

Let's talk about Hollywood tomorrow. But Hollywood has elements of Skid Row in it. And many of those transient residents living in SRO's are white. They commit crimes throughout the area. It is just plain wrong attribute the predominant source of crimes to those only in attention grabbing scenarios.

Once I heard Former Chief Bratton make a statement that stunned me. He walked so smugly in front of the cameras. Paraphrasing, he proclaimed , the minorities are committing more than 50% of the crimes in the city. So nobody should get their panties bunched up because he said minorities are committing all the crimes.most of the crimes in the city.

Chief Bratton left out a very salient point. In Los Angeles, so called minorities comprise (and I may be wrong about this number and I am too tired to research out the exact figure for that year) more than 50% of the population for the city. So, If that is the case, the minorities are no longer minorities. They are the majority. And that difference in perspective is subtle, distinct and can be used to influence thinking.

The association of young black men with violence doesn't come out of thin air

By John McWhorter Aug. 22, 2013124 Comments

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Australian Christopher Lane was killed on Monday in Oklahoma by three teens, one of whom has said they were just “bored.” The right is complaining that the media is making nothing of the fact that two of the teens were black whereas Lane was white, as opposed to the massive alarm sounded in cases such as white (or white-ish) George Zimmerman killing black Trayvon Martin. And again the cry was heard that there is more “black-on-black” or “black-on-white” crime than “white-on-black,” and that young black men are in fact more of a problem than people like Zimmerman.

The numbers don’t lie: young black men do commit about 50% of the murders in the U.S. We don’t yet know whether the attack on Lane was racially motivated, nor can we know whether the three black boys who attacked a white boy on a Florida school bus recently would not have done the same to a black kid. (Critics took Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson to task for not condemning the violence.) But hardly uncommon are cases such as the two black guys who doused a white 13-year-old with gasoline and lit him on fire, saying “You get what you deserve, white boy” (Kansas City, Mo.) or 20 black kids who beat up white Matthew Owens on his porch “for Trayvon” (Mobile, Ala.).

So, it’s just fake to pretend that the association of young black men with violence comes out of thin air. Young black men murder 14 times more than young white men. If the kinds of things I just mentioned were regularly done by whites, it’d be trumpeted as justification for being scared to death ofIt’s not that black communities are in complete denial about these statistics — Stop the Violence events are a staple of high-crime areas. But let’s face it: black America isn’t nearly as indignant about black boys killing one another or whites as about the occasional white cop killing one black boy, even though the former wreaks much more havoc in black communities. There is no coordinated nationwide movement equivalent to the one Martin galvanized. There are no thoughtful films “exploring” black-on-black crime the way Fruitvale Station treats the death of Oscar Grant, a young black man who was killed by transit police in Oakland, Calif.

And recent example illustrates how many blacks feel about who is murdering whom. Two weeks ago, an NYPD cop killed 14-year-old Shaaliver Douse. Douse was in the process of shooting other people, and had been charged with shooting someone else in May — and yet his aunt compared him to Martin. In her mind, the main sin was the white cop’s.

Granted, it seems a lot easier to do something about the Zimmermans than the black thugs. Protest profiling and police departments institute new programs. But black thugs aren’t moved by protests, so it can seem like we’re just stuck with them.

But who’s to say what would happen if black America exerted even half of the emotional fervor and brainpower it does over cases like Martin’s to thinking about how to keep black boys from going wrong? Annette John-Hall had some wise words on this last year. What kind of self-image do we have to assume we can only change others, but not ourselves?

For the time being, though, it’s time for the media to stop proudly emblazoning the race of white cops who kill black boys while cagily describing black teens as, say, “from the grittier part of town,” as has been the case regarding Lane’s killers. The media needs to be as honest with black people as we need to be with ourselves. No group gets ahead by turning away from its real problems.

"But we're not there yet. We’re not there yet. And so we've got to keep working on it. And for the president to speak out on it is appropriate. I think all leaders, black and white, should speak out on this issue." - Colin Powell on Trayvon verdict, "I think that it will be seen as a questionable judgment on the part of the judicial system..."

Yet the last example he had of discrimination against himself was 1963?? "I’ve been refused access to restaurants where I couldn't eat, even though I just came back from Vietnam. "We can't give you a hamburger. Come back some other time." and I did, right after the civil rights act of 1964. I went right back to that same place and got my hamburger, and they are more than happy to serve me now."

This is a remarkable sea change from what my generation is used to hearing from a Civil rights leader. Martin Luther King (aka Michael) "borrowed" from this Archibald Carey speech for his I have a Dream speech (that his family has since copyrighted).

In this speech we can hear Carey CHAMPION the REPBULICAN party! The party of the downtrodden and minorities. The party of freedom for the entire world.

I recall it was Dick Morris who pointed out that most Blacks were Republicans until Goldwater refused to push for Civil Rights. I didn't know that that was the reason for the sea change in their voting. I was only a couple years older than the ONE at the time of the '63 speech. Amazing how the Blacks will vote as a block and change on a dime. Recall when Bill Clinton was quoted as saying "you know a Black can't win" when referring to Bamster. The very next day Hillary tanked in the polls. Similar event occurred with Goldwater/Johnson I guess.

In any case the speech drags on a long time. Indeed I couldn't listen to all of it. I suggest listen to 10 or fifteen minutes:

Interesting point made by Thomas Sowell missed by most economists and historians:

Many people -- especially politicians and activists -- want to take credit for the economic and other advancement of blacks, even though a larger proportion of blacks rose out of poverty in the 20 years before 1960 than in the 20 years afterwards.

FRC's Tony Perkins: "As a former quarterback, Craig James isn't used to being on the defensive. ... The retired Pro-Bowler became the latest face of the war on religious liberty, when -- after one day on the job -- Fox Sports gave James the boot for his conservative views on marriage. And here's the kicker: he made the comments, not at the sports desk, but during last year's Senate campaign! ... High level executives felt he hadn't been properly vetted (or, properly excluded, depending on how you look at it). When the news broke, a Fox Sports spokesman tried to explain away the network's religious profiling. 'We just asked ourselves how Craig's statements would play in our human resources department. He couldn't say those things here.' First off, Craig didn't say them there -- or anywhere in his commentating capacity. He stated his position as a candidate for public office -- in response to legitimate constituent questions. ... Is the grip of religious hostility so tight that Americans can't even have an open debate for fear it'll cost them their jobs?"

More whining from minorities. The MSM makes a few racist twitter posts after an woman of Indian decent won Miss America as some sort of national scandal. A few twitter posts do not represent America. I wish the MSM would stop dividing us by race.

How is it that at least three of the judges on Miss America are gay? Of course, we know they don't judge contestants based on political correctness do they?

The new Miss America, Nina Davuluri, wants to be a doctor. The 24-year-old Miss New York is the first Indian-American woman to win the competition, too. The latter startled some after her victory last Sunday night.

Fox News & Commentary host Todd Starnes tweeted that Miss Kansas, runner-up Theresa Vail, lost because “she actually represented American values.” You know, because being “American” has a standard dictionary definition, which Starnes describes as a gun-toting, deer-hunting military veteran.

Several other Twitter users latched onto this skewed ideology, calling Davuluri an “Arab” and “Miss 7-11.” They also said Vail deserved to win because she “looked American.” White was the synonym they were probably looking for to describe “American.” While these folks are in the minority — I hope — it casts an unnecessary shadow over a historic win for Davuluri.

The Syracuse native touts herself as “Miss Diversity,” and thanks to the judges, she is. Her parents emigrated to the United States more than 30 years ago. Yet, she still had to defend herself a day later, telling reporters that she has to “rise above” the criticism. And that is the problem.

I have family members who are Indian — aunts and uncles, who, before last Sunday, would probably chuckle at the notion of an Indian Miss America. It is not out of ignorance, but rather how women are portrayed in American society.

Thin, beautiful and white. The social stratosphere is damning. Just ask the sororities at the University of Alabama. This week, the university moved to end segregation and admit black students to the historically white sororities on campus. There are numbers, too. A recent Reuters poll shows that 40 percent of white Americans have no minority friends.

How does that fit in? Well, it blankets the demographic. By 2050, minorities will be the majority, but you would not know it. This conservative-leaning notion of what it means to be American startles me. Conservatives’ “outreach efforts,” or lack thereof, to minorities comes across as market research.

But, it is more than the definition of an American. More than politics, civil rights or the racist remarks of a few.

Women and minorities are born into a world filled with misrepresentation. The perception of these long-ignored and overlooked groups has changed some, but not enough. A host of issues like inaccurate criticism or suppressed voting rights still exist.

And few are willing to empower those who need it, which is why Davuluri’s win is so important for women and minorities. Standing out should not involve wearing flesh-toned underwear on a major network like Miley Cyrus, but rather, a Davuluri using her $50,000 in prize money for medical studies.

The Miss America pageant is still based on an outdated platform that ultimately judges looks above intellect. Well, certain looks anyway.

Since 1983, there have been an Asian, an Indian and eight African-American Miss America winners. The token minority in a television commercial or business office is still the norm.

Airport screenings are not random, either. If I do not shave my beard, the TSA will pat me down.

It is only when minorities become those familiar “American” faces on a national stage, beyond the president, that the negative reactions will decline in the public eye. Stereotypes like “terrorist,” “drug dealer” or the “bad guy” would have to be gone.

Until then, the controversy will overshadow the progress of Davuluri and others.

Anthony Cave is a junior journalism student at Florida International University.

an anecdotal story. I was speaking to a Russian Jewish physician colleague about medical care in Russia. How the poor people there would be grateful for any attention at all. How rewarding that can be to really feel appreciated as a doctor not just a commodity provider. Then in walks another colleague and friend who is Indian. He said the same is true in India particularly in rural India and amongst its' poor. He then want on and noted how Blacks in the US are constantly complaining. It took us one generation to achieve so much success here and Blacks have been here for what 200 yrs and they still do nothing but make excuses. He then called them "privileged". You want to see poverty go to the back streets of India.

I do admire my Indian colleagues. Maybe American minorities should study and learn from them. And stop bitching. This can still be the greatest country in the world.

From a Sept. 22 letter written by Jason Morgan, a doctoral candidate at the University of Wisconsin in Madison, complaining to his supervisor about the school-mandated diversity training for teaching assistants:

At the end of yesterday's diversity "re-education," we were told that our next session would include a presentation on "Trans Students." At that coming session, according to the handout we were given, we will learn how to let students 'choose their own pronouns', how to correct other students who mistakenly use the wrong pronouns, and how to ask people which pronouns they prefer ("I use the pronouns he/him/his. I want to make sure I address you correctly. What pronouns do you use?"). Also on the agenda for next week are "important trans struggles, as well as those of the intersexed and other gender-variant communities," "stand[ing] up to the rules of gender," and a very helpful glossary of related terms and acronyms, to wit: "Trans": for those who "identify along the gender-variant spectrum," and "Genderqueer": "for those who consider their gender outside the binary gender system". I hasten to reiterate that I am quoting from diversity handouts; I am not making any of this up.

Please allow me to be quite frank. My job, which I love, is to teach students Japanese history. This week, for example, I have been busy explaining the intricacies of the Genpei War (1180-1185), during which time Japan underwent a transition from an earlier, imperial-rule system under regents and cloistered emperors to a medieval, feudal system run by warriors and estate managers. It is an honor and a great joy to teach students the history of Japan. I take my job very seriously, and I look forward to coming to work each day.

It is most certainly not my job, though, to cheer along anyone, student or otherwise, in their psychological confusion.

A group of 10 white youths — one of them a 12-year-old girl — surrounded a black couple’s car in Brooklyn, viciously beating the husband and yanking the wife to the pavement by her hair as they peppered the two with racial slurs, authorities said.

“Get those [n-words]!” some of them screamed, according to court papers. “Get that black whore!”

Ronald Russo, 30, and his wife, Alanna, apparently had the green light and the husband honked at the group to get out of the way. The rowdy kids started kicking the car, according to the criminal complaint. Ronald Russo got out to check on potential damage to his vehicle.

Ronald Russo was dragged to the ground. Then he was punched and kicked in the head. He felt more blows all over his body, investigators said. He suffered a fractured nose, a broken septum, a blood clot and abrasions to his shoulder…

In the midst of the attack, there was a steady chorus of epithets. “Black motherf—–!” screamed the attackers, who ranged in age from 12 to 18.

Congratulations, you pathetic teabaggers. This is all thanks to your sick, bigoted hatred of America’s first black president. Happy now?

Get ready for this story to be smeared across the national headlines for the next few months, wingnuts. Al Sharpton is gonna wipe the floor with you. This is what you get.

You racists.

Correction: Whoops! Ronald and Alanna Russo are white. And they were called “crackers” and “white motherf—–” and such as they were kicked and beaten, not that really bad word starting with “n.” Never mind. Nothing to see here. Local crime story.

Colin Powell and his aide did not like hearing that Powell supported Barack Obama for President only because of race. But it was Powell who gave no coherent reason other than race as to why he supported Obama IMO and many others. And that makes those noticing that and pointing it out racists?

Is Powell not the poster person for Republican in name only charge? He worked for Republicans and at some point said he was one - a Barack Obama Republican. Sure. Barack Obama was the left-most member of the United States Senate. His sole executive experience qualifying to be President was running a campaign staff. His only foreign policy credential was to articulate a position on the main question of the day the exact opposite of Colin Powell's. Obama's domestic policy positions were the exact opposite of Republican up and down the line. And Powell chose him over a war hero and over a successful moderate Republican experienced executive. For what reasons other than race? None that he articulated.

Realignment? It was not a total realignment, nor does it demonstrate one side is racist. Did I read or understand that wrong? Some of us were Republican before and after that, and at least claim to not be racist. There were other issues too. Of these southern Democrats where racism was prevalent, were they still racist after the switch of parties? Wasn't the switch largely because the Dem party nationally did not match the views of Dems on other issues in those southern states? Were they racist if they voted for tax cuts or for a stronger foreign policy? And what about those who did not realign? Fritz Hollings, Robert Byrd come to mind. http://dailycaller.com/2010/06/28/sen-robert-byrd-not-only-was-a-kkk-member-but-led-his-local-klan-chapter/ If the point at least implied is that the racists were Republican, I'm not convinced and haven't seen any evidence of it. Even if Ed Schultz' sidekick says it's so.

"suggesting that the vast majority of blacks could be so easily "fooled" Democratic party is demeaning to people's intelligence, and is itself racist"

Blacks vote largely Democratic. Why? Republican racism? If so, where is that evidence? The Col. Lawrence Wilkerson accusation? Wilkerson is a regular guest of the Ed Schultz show; he tolerates the host who called Laura Ingraham a "right wing slut". http://nation.foxnews.com/ed-schultz/2011/05/25/outrageous Sexism, he sees nothing, but he knows racism and switched parties. Convenient.

Blacks vote Dem because they were told and a large majority believed those policies were better - for blacks and for the country. Now we know better. Maybe we'll see a new 'realignment'.

"The other point I question is racist 'realignment'." But not realignment?

"Is Powell not the poster person for Republican in name only charge?" Then there sure are a great number "poster" people. And so what: that wasn't the point of the article GM posted.

What is a "total" realignment?

And, originally all I said was that there was a party realignment after a claim that "nothing had changed" in electoral politics. GM, in his typical fashion, took that much farther and made claims of racism for an entire political party. I didn't see you comment on that claim, Doug.

"Some of us were Republican before and after that, and at least claim to not be racist." But this isn't the case with Democrats? Again, if the claim that an entire party is racist is wrong, why didn't you take GM to task for painting the entire Democratic party in an ugly light. Why only step in now?

When there is a claim that insults the intelligence of a great number of (insert race here) people, then the claim is racist.

Nothing excuses sexism, but illustrating a point of sexism doesn't sweep something else under the rug.

"why didn't you take GM to task for painting the entire Democratic party in an ugly light. Why only step in now?"

You were answering GM's take quite well without my help. I agree his longer post about Democrats was unfairly one sided, but these points get compiled to answer a huge narrative out there that one side is racist. I agree with you that from within the political arena, it was LBJ who led the civil rights legislation. He passed it with a majority of Republicans and a minority of Democrats. My failed attempt at a point on total realignment was that some of the Democrats who voting against civil rights legislation switched sides, for other reasons I think, and some like Al Gore Sr. did not. Southern Democrats who left the Democrat party did so (IMO) because the national party did not match their views on the issues, not about race or racism. Rick Perry's conservative economic ideology fit inside the Texas Democrat party not that long ago, as one example. Certainly not now.

Being a Republican and having been to countless conventions and events, I have witnessed no racism inside the party. I don't know of a Republican who wants blacks to stay poor or that doesn't wish more would come to our side. The charge liberals make of racism is laziness IMO and a diversion from not addressing the ideological differences. We see individual economic freedom as a better way to let people rise up, while leftist groups like ACORN go into black neighborhoods and push 'welfare rights', which largely keep people down. For the record, economic freedom IS a far better way for people rise up out of poverty.

"Nothing excuses sexism, but illustrating a point of sexism doesn't sweep something else under the rug."

Point well taken, but I was happy to point out that man's selective ability to take offense.

President Obama holds up a proposed mortgage application form during a speech at the James Lee Community Center in Falls Church, Va., on Feb. 1, 2012...

Already looking at $100 billion in federal legal penalties over the mortgage crisis, major lenders fear they face a large and undefined liability under the government's aggressive anti-discrimination enforcement and are pushing for officials to define where they're drawing the line.

The Obama administration has kept the statistical methodology it uses to prove lending bias in both home and car finance so secret that a bipartisan group of 22 senators — including 11 Democrats — fired off a letter to regulators Oct. 30 demanding details.

Senators asked the administration to clarify what constitutes a "statistically significant" racial disparity in auto loan outcomes that would trigger prosecution.In a Nov. 4 letter of reply, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) refused to say.

Alan Kaplinsky of Ballard Spahr LLP, a national law firm specializing in bank regulation compliance, called the response "less than satisfactory."

Threshold Unclear

It "did not provide a basis-point threshold for determining when statistically significant disparities exist, as the senators requested," noted Kaplinsky, who heads the firm's consumer financial services practice.

The Obama administration is the first to sue lenders for bias under the controversial civil rights doctrine known as "disparate impact." So far it's sued more than two dozen banks under the theory, which relies on computer screens of loan data to find differences in approval rates and loan terms.

"They're taking a shortcut and not getting a true picture" of individual creditworthiness, Washington lawyer Andrew Sandler, who has defended several banks in lending-bias cases, told IBD.

Larry Dillon, president of C&F Mortgage in Virginia, says Justice Department prosecutors refused to consider credit risks when they accused C&F of charging some black borrowers more for loans in 2012.

"They would not let us use loan-to-value ratios or debt-to-income ratios" to explain statistical differences in loan pricing, he told IBD. "If they had, there would be little, if any, disparity."

Difficult Defense

The administration insists "statistically significant" racial disparities in loan denials or loan costs are all the evidence it needs.

Lenders complain that the standard of proof is so low it's all but impossible to defend against disparate-impact claims. They want to know what they can do to limit their exposure to anti-redlining investigations while still complying with new Dodd-Frank Act rules that discourage pricing loans for risk in the wake of the subprime mortgage crisis, which disproportionately affected minority borrowers.

In June, eight financial and business trade groups sent a letter to the CFPB and HUD seeking "clarity" on how lenders can avoid liability under new disparate-impact regulations. They also sought written guidance on the metrics that investigators use to determine discrimination, arguing the "lack of guidance will create great uncertainty, resulting in higher prices to account for risk and less available credit for consumers."

"Compliance with one regulation should not make it impossible to comply with another," the groups said.

Before the crisis, lenders were sued for not originating enough loans in minority neighborhoods. Now they're being sued for "steering" low-income minority borrowers into loans that typically charge borrowers more to compensate for the higher risk of default based on traditional credit standards.

Chevy Chase Bank is an example. In the 1990s, the Washington lender was ordered by then-Deputy Attorney General Eric Holder to "target African-American neighborhoods" in poor areas of the capital and "aggressively solicit" loans for low-income blacks living there. In September, Holder, now attorney general, ordered Chevy Chase to pay almost $3 million to minority borrowers who defaulted on subprime loans.

Banks say they feel like they're "damned if they do and damned if they don't" lend to poor or credit-impaired minorities, American Bankers Association President Frank Keating said June 26 in a published column.

"Lenders are facing lawsuits and prosecutions even if they have done nothing wrong," Keating said.

They've received little guidance from regulators. On Oct. 22, five financial regulatory agencies issued a statement "in response to inquiries from creditors about whether they would be liable under the disparate impact doctrine of the Equal Credit Opportunity Act" if they originate only mortgages that comply with new rules meant to ensure loans are made only to borrowers who can repay them.

The agencies did not provide specific yardsticks, saying their "general approach and expectations regarding fair lending, including disparate impact doctrine, are summarized in prior guidance." But they said, "In selecting business models and product offerings, we expect that creditors would consider demonstrable factors that may include credit risk, secondary market opportunities, capital requirements, and liability risk."

Regulators referred to two published government documents, the 2009 "Interagency Fair Lending Examination Procedures" and the 1994 "Policy Statement on Discrimination in Lending," which was adopted by the Obama administration in 2011. Both documents warn that "substantial" or "significant" racial disparities in loan denial rates or loan pricing can trigger investigations. Neither defines these terms.

The banking industry has turned to Congress for help. So far, lawmakers have failed to get the administration to disclose the econometric methodology it uses to measure whether discrimination is present in a lender's portfolio.

The administration recently expanded disparate-impact enforcement to include not just home lenders but also the auto industry. Auto lenders were supposed to be exempt from Dodd-Frank rules.

In their Oct. 30 letter to Richard Cordray, director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, the 22 senators demanded that the administration reveal its investigative methods. Specifically, they asked Cordray to make public the numerical trigger point at which racial lending gaps violate federal law and justify discrimination charges.In his response, Cordray could not provide a fixed level at which such gaps set off alarm bells, or even a danger range. He said the formula used by investigators "varies" case by case.

Nor could Cordray list any controlling risk factors that could explain racial disparities, saying he could not identify them all.

Such factors are key to lenders' defense against disparate-impact claims. Defendants say prosecutors have failed to control for all the risk factors that go into lending decisions when comparing final loan decision data by racial group. They say the administration is not actually comparing borrowers with similar credit backgrounds, which skews results and makes it look as if race is the cause of gaps, when in fact it's risk.

Consider Nara Bank of Los Angeles. Since 2009, it fought a federal suit claiming it overcharged blacks and Latinos for car loans. The Justice Department alleged a "statistically significant" disparity between "mark-ups" charged to blacks and Latinos versus Asians was proof that Nara discriminated.

A district judge dismissed the suit after agreeing that the government's statistical analysis of loan terms was faulty because it didn't consider other important factors. But after Justice appealed, Nara in September agreed to a nominal settlement while still denying wrongdoing.

"Creditors may, over time, feel increasing pressure to make" such risky loans, said Richard Andreano of Ballard Spahr. Such political pressure led to the economically devastating mortgage crisis, critics say.

More and more bankers are giving rejected applications another look as protection against disparate-impact prosecution.

Last year the American Bankers Association, in a "fair lending toolbox" distributed to banks, advised its 5,000 members to give rejected minority loan applicants a "second look," which it said "can result in suggested changes in underwriting standards."